Tiinker.com

I have decided to write more. For that I have to move beyond the usual crap I dish out every month! This time a website review. Just for you!

I am a news freak. I read a lot about all the useful and useless stuff. I browse through the rss feeds in Google Reader, visit news sites (usually ibn), get my daily fix of digg etc. Not that I assimilate everything, its rather in the moment thing. I do recollect stuff if really required.

Personalised news is something I like. Google News does provide a bit of that, still I think its not cool enough.

What do I want from such a site?
a) Personalisation (duh!)
b) Ability to save certain stuff for future reference.
c) Great interface.
d) A degree of coolness!

Digg provides the facility to view the stories you dugg. But the navigation is a mess and its a big pain to go through all that. Google Reader lets you star the stuff you want. But still it has got something missing.

Enter Tiinker!

Tiinker is a personalised news service which constantly learns what you want and delivers the same. Its in closed private beta, so there are bound to be issues. From all the 30 minutes I have seen of this thing, it is really great. Meets all the criteria I have listed above.

The interface is really usable and looks clean. Seamless web 2.0 navigation is lovely and very fast. Stories are neatly stacked in a readable manner. You vote up the article you like and vote down the ones you don't. Tiinker learns from your preferences and delivers news accordingly.

There is also a functionality called scrapbook. Each story has a scrapbook icon with which you can mark the items. These are then available in your scrapbook.

There are several categories under which the news items are pooled. I think there can be several more categories or subcategories ala digg. First thing I did was vote down the irrelevant articles. Many of them are american centric and the sports page was completely american. NBA, NFL, NHL stuff with one item about ICL. Hopefully, the filters does kick in and I get to enjoy the stuff I really want.

Now for the wishlist.

A friends network, with several groupings possible. News sharing. Also, sharing of stuff with specific people. But I don't want too much networking. Just share and do your own stuff. May be a widget to get your shared stuff to Orkut, Facebook etc would be cool thing too.

Am I asking for too much? Lets see how things pan out.

Anyway, I enjoyed using Tiinker and I hope its accessible from work. Want an invite? Just drop a line! :-)

I really enjoyed writing about this and I think for the next post we will talk about Wixi.
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